All my life I have been passionately interested in monomaniacs of any kind, people carried away by a single idea. The more one limits oneself, the closer one is to the infinite; these people, as unworldly as they seem, burrow like termites into their own particular material to construct, in miniature, a strange and utterly individual image of the world.

Immanuel Kant lived with knowledge as with his lawfully wedded wife, slept with it in the same intellectual bed for forty years and begot an entire German race of philosophical systems.

When it looks at great accomplishments, the world, bent on simplifying its images, likes best to look at the dramatic, picturesquemoments experienced by its heroes.... But the no less creative years of preparation remain in the shadow.

Truth to tell, we are all criminals if we remain silent.

There are two types of compassion. One - is faint-hearted and sentimental. Actually, it is nothing more than impatience of the heart, that is hurrying to get rid of that hard feeling when you see other peoples' sufferings; this is not a compassion, but just an instinct will to defence yourself from misfortunes of others. But there is another compassion - real one, that demands for actions, not sentiments, it knows what it wants, and it is full of determination to do everything, what is in human power and even beyond it.

Now I am discovering the world once more. England has widened my horizon.

In chess, as a purely intellectual game, where randomness is excluded, - for someone to play against himself is absurd ... It is as paradoxical, as attempting to jump over his own shadow.